PRINCETON, NJ — Gallup’s 2010 Confidence in Institutions poll finds Congress ranking dead last out of the 16 institutions rated this year. Eleven percent of Americans say they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in Congress, down from 17% in 2009 and a percentage point lower than the previous low for Congress, recorded in 2008.

The Gallup poll was conducted July 8-11, shortly before Congress passed a major financial regulatory reform bill, which President Obama signed into law this week.

Military Still No. 1

The military continues its long-standing run as the highest-rated U.S. institution. Small business and the police occupy second and third places, respectively. These three top-tier institutions all earn high confidence from a majority of Americans, something no other institution achieves this year.

The military has been No. 1 in Gallup’s annual Confidence in Institutions list continuously since 1998, and has ranked No.1 or No. 2 almost every year since its initial 1975 measure.

Shirley Sherrod said this morning on CNN that she would like to “get back at” Andrew Breitbart.

~NOW we’re getting to the bottom of this entire “Charade” (Pronounced Sherrod)

Asked if she would consider a defamation suit against Breibart, the conservative blogger who posted the edited clip that got her fired, she said, “I really think I should.”

“I don’t know a lot about the legal profession but that’s one person I’d like to get back at, because he came at me. He didn’t go after the NAACP; he came at me,” she went on.

She agreed with the hosts that it would be a “great thing” if Big Government was shut down. “I don’t see how that advances us in this country.”

“It’s hard for me to understand a person like him, and it’s hard for me to understand what is his purpose, what is he trying to do really,” she said. “He could easily make a decision to destroy me, but in destroying me, what else is he trying to do?”

Sherrod also said on today that she’d like to have a meeting with President Obama.

“I can’t say that the president is fully behind me, I would hope that he is,” she said on Good Morning America. “I would love to talk to him.”

“He is not someone who has experienced what I have experienced through life, being a person of color. He might need to hear some of what I could say to him,” she told me. “I don’t know if that would guide him in a way that he deals with others like me, but I at least would like to have the opportunity to talk to him about it.”

Laura Ingraham said it best on her show today:

Hour 1: Shirley Sherrod’s seven minutes in heaven…

Shirley Sherrod milks her 15 minutes of fame for all it’s worth…which turns out to be a seven-minute phone call with the President of the United States.

A verified lie: The White House says they put no pressure on Sherrod to resign. She says they did. Someone’s lying, and it’s probably the party with something still left to lose.

Ieshuh Griffin, an independent running for a downtown Milwaukee seat in the state Assembly, wants to use the phrase, “NOT the ‘whiteman’s b—-.'”

But the state’s Government Accountability Board voted to bar that wording, agreeing with a staff recommendation that it is pejorative and therefore not allowed.

State law allows independent candidates to have five words describing themselves placed after their names on the ballot as long as it’s not pejorative, profane, discriminatory or includes an obscene word or phrase.

Griffin, who is black, argued her case to the five white, retired judges on the board that regulates elections. She said the phrase was protected free speech.

“It’s a freedom of expression,” she said. “It’s not racial. It’s not a slur.”

~Sorry honey, it became racial when you said you were no “WHITE” man’s beatch. The difference between lowclass & Sarah Palin, who will not take it from “The Good Old Boys” holds more water. Now, if you wanted to be NO man’s Beatch, than it’s merely sexist as opposed to racist. And you are running for public office?

She convinced three of the judges that the wording should be allowed, but two said it should not. One judge was absent, and Griffin needed four votes to succeed. Griffin said she intends to seek an injunction in federal court.

“Isn’t she saying, ‘I’m not under the white man’s direction? I’m independent of that.’ Isn’t that what she’s saying?” Myse said.

The phrase was included on nomination papers Griffin circulated to get the 200 signatures needed to be on the Nov. 2 ballot. Griffin, who described herself as a “30ish” ~(Ding, ding, ding…) …community activist, will still appear as an independent candidate.

We began our series on Journolist earlier this week with the expectation that our stories would be met with a fury of criticism from the Left. A hurt dog barks, after all.

The response hasn’t been all that furious, actually, probably because there isn’t much for the exposed members of Journolist to say. We caught them. They’re ashamed. The wise ones are waiting for the tempest to pass.

There have, however, been two lines of argument that we probably ought to respond to, if only because they may harden into received wisdom if we don’t. The first is that our pieces have proved only that liberal journalists have liberal views, and that’s hardly news.

To be clear: We’re not contesting the right of anyone, journalist or not, to have political opinions. (I, for one, have made a pretty good living expressing mine.) What we object to is partisanship, which is by its nature dishonest, a species of intellectual corruption. Again and again, we discovered members of Journolist working to coordinate talking points on behalf of Democratic politicians, principally Barack Obama. That is not journalism, and those who engage in it are not journalists. They should stop pretending to be. The news organizations they work for should stop pretending, too.

The second line of attack we’ve encountered since we began the series is familiar to anyone who has ever published a piece whose subject didn’t like the finished product: “You quoted me out of context!”

The short answer is, no we didn’t. I edited the first four stories myself, and I can say that our reporter Jonathan Strong is as meticulous and fair as anyone I have worked with.

That assurance won’t stop the attacks, of course. So why don’t we publish whatever portions of the Journolist archive we have and end the debate? Because a lot of them have no obvious news value, for one thing. Gather 400 lefty reporters and academics on one listserv and it turns out you wind up with a strikingly high concentration of bitchiness. Shocking amounts, actually. So while it might be amusing to air threads theorizing about the personal and sexual shortcomings of various New Republic staffers, we’ve decided to pull back.

The ongoing controversy surrounding the actions of two members of the New Black Panther Party at a Philadelphia polling place during the last presidential election has become increasingly less about facts and more about opinions. The mainstream media ignored the story for so long, basically giving Fox News exclusive rights to deliver the story to a mass audience and now they’re incensed over Fox’s coverage.

On Sunday Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander wrote “Indeed, until Thursday’s story, The Post had written no news stories about the controversy this year. In 2009, there were passing references to it in only three stories” and “For months, readers have contacted the ombudsman wondering why The Post hasn’t been covering the case.” Alexander’s column prompted a response by Joel Meares in the Columbia Journalism Review. His point was that Fox News’ coverage cannot be trusted because of the channel’s alleged conservatism and, in a nice example of ideological bigotry, that the story is not worth being covered because conservatives are interested in seeing it covered.

He wrote “The story has been mostly told online and on TV by those whose political shadings have dictated the angle, and the content” and questions The Post’s motivation in publishing something its readers apparently want to read:

Alexander does not even mention or outline who these readers are who have been inundating the paper with requests for more coverage. Are they genuinely concerned Post readers miffed that they’re missing the story? Or—and we can’t help feeling this is more likely—are they the Fox viewers and @SarahPalinUSA followers he mentions in his cursory paragraph on the ideologies driving the story?

This is leftist arrogance at its finest: how dare The Washington Post, the paper that brought down boogeyman Nixon (not true, by the way), do something that pleases their readers—and may even bring them new ones? How dare the huge amount of Fox News viewers and Sarah Palin’s 200,000 Twitter followers read the sacred Washington Post? It’s sacrilege, nay blasphemy, for a conservative to read The Post.

“Does the campaign of a highly motivated and hyper partisan group warrant the ombudsman’s call for more coverage from a newspaper traditionally above the fray?” wrote Meares, before linking to Media Matters’ (sourceless) coverage of the story and quoting its assessment of J. Christian Adams, the Department of Justice lawyer who brought the story to Fox’s attention.

The truly disheartening thing about Maeres’ piece—and indeed something seen often among liberal commentators—is the use of the poisoning the well fallacy. Instead of answering allegations with facts or bothering to care about the issues, the commentators question motives and affiliations. Hence instead of being concerned about Congressman Bob Etheridge (D-NC) possibly committing criminal assault on two students, Dave Weigel and Reliable Sources want to know if the students worked for Andrew Breitbart; instead of being concerned that The Daily Caller’s JournoList revelations show determination by journalists to suppress a story harmful to the candidate they favored and make slanderous attacks on his enemies, Mediate’s Phillip Bump instead focused on the openly non-objective Daily Caller being non-objective.

Living under a nanny state government officially makes us little kids again. But that’s not all bad. One of the joys we had as children was being read a good book. Well grab your blankie and snuggle up, because Sonja has a book thats perfect for just a time like this titled, The House that Americans built